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Boy Scouts ordered to pay $18.5M in sex abuse case

View full size(AP Photo/Rick Bowmer)Plaintiff Kerry Lewis smiles during a news conference Friday, April 23, 2010, in Portland, Ore. A jury on Friday ordered the Boy Scouts of America to pay $18.5 million to Lewis, who was sexually abused by a former assistant Scoutmaster in what is believed to be the largest such award against the organization.

View full size(AP Photo/Rick Bowmer)Plaintiff Kerry Lewis, left, holds his lawyer Paul Mones hand in the court room Friday, April 23, 2010, in Portland, Ore. A jury on Friday ordered the Boy Scouts of America to pay $18.5 million to Lewis who was sexually abused by a former assistant Scoutmaster in what is believed to be the largest such award against the organization.

PORTLAND, Ore. -- An Oregon jury's decision to award a man
$18.5 million in punitive damages in his case against the Boy Scouts of
America will likely be the first of many financial hits the Scouts will
take as it prepares to defend itself against a series of sex abuse
lawsuits.

The jury on Friday ordered the Scouts to make the
payment to Kerry Lewis, the victim of sex abuse by a former assistant
Scoutmaster in Portland in the early 1980s.

The case was the
first of six filed against the Boy Scouts in the same court in Oregon,
with at least one other separate case pending. If mediation fails to
settle the other cases, they also could go to trial.

Lawyers for
Lewis had asked the jury to award at least $25 million to punish the
Boy Scouts for what the jury had already agreed in the first phase of
the trial was reckless and outrageous conduct.

They also noted
the Boy Scouts had never apologized to Lewis, who said Friday at a news
conference that the verdict shows that "big corporations can't be above
the law."

Lewis added that an apology "would mean something to me, but I'm not expecting it."

The
jury decided on April 13 that the Boy Scouts were negligent for
allowing former assistant Scoutmaster Timur Dykes to associate with
Scouts, including Lewis, after Dykes admitted to a Scouts official in
1983 that he had molested 17 boys.

The jury awarded Lewis $1.4
million in compensatory damages with that verdict and agreed the Boy
Scouts were liable for punitive damages to be determined in the second
phase of the trial that ended Thursday.

Scouts officials declined
to comment on details of the case because other cases are pending, but
issued a statement saying it maintains a "rigorous" system to screen
Scout leaders.

"The Boy Scouts of America has always stood against child abuse of any kind," it said.

The verdict came as the Boy Scouts mark their centennial.

For
more than a month, dueling experts and a parade of witnesses from both
sides wove together a picture of an organization that compiled secret
files on child molesters for nearly the entire century it has been in
existence.

The "ineligible volunteer" files, nicknamed the
"perversion files," are kept under lock and key at Scouts headquarters,
now in Irving, Texas, a practice that began back in the 1920s.

The
Scouts said the files were put to good use quietly keeping molesters
out of the organization for all those years. But Lewis' attorneys
argued that the Scout should have brought the files out into the open
decades ago.

After an Oregon Supreme Court ruling, the jury was permitted to see about 1,000 of the files from 1965-85.

In
determining the award, the jury was allowed to consider the wealth of
the Boy Scouts to decide the amount of punitive damages.

Kelly
Clark and Paul Mones, the attorneys for Lewis, told them the Boy Scouts
were nearly a $1 billion corporation that could well afford punitive
damages intended to deter them from similar conduct in the future.

The
amount of the damages surprised Patrick Boyle, editor of the Youth
Today newspaper and author of a book about sex abuse within the Scouts.

"That's
a lot of money. This is by far the biggest award against the Scouts for
sex abuse, probably by several times," Boyle said.

The Scouts
have said they plan to appeal Friday's decision, and 60 percent of any
punitive damages they finally pay in the case will go to the Oregon
crime victims fund under state law.

Because the Boy Scouts have
settled some lawsuits out of court, it is difficult to say where the
total awards imposed by the Portland jury rank with those of the past.

In
a 1987 sex abuse case, an Oregon jury awarded more than $4 million to
the victim, including $2 million in punitive damages against the Scouts
that were thrown out when the case was appealed. A jury in San
Bernardino, Calif., awarded $3.75 million to three sex abuse victims in
1991.

Boyle said from 1984 through 1992, the Scouts were sued at
least 60 times for alleged sex abuse with settlements and judgments
totaling more than $16 million.